a little ribbing

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Vest Ribing

I have one row of ribbing to go. This ribbing has been slow going and quite hard work. I am not sure whether it is purely an artifact of knitting with two strands or whether it is partially due to the resulting bulky yarn on medium needles but despite consciously knitting loosely my hands have been aching. It’s just as well I am LOVING the fabric this yarn is making, I adore the colour in particular, I just can’t wait to be done so that I can wear it!

I have also been struggling with the join between the last knit and first purl stitch of each ribbing repeat. Both stitches are looser than they should be. If you look at the left most knit stitch of each repeat above you can see that is looser than the other two stitches, and below is a shot showing what the wrong side of the purl stitches looks like. Yikes.

Vest Ribing

First I tried consciously tightening the last knit and first purl of each repetition. When that didn’t work I tried changing from combined knitting to continental, then consciously tightening the last knit and first purl of each repetition while knitting continental style. None of it seems to have made any difference. I have thought fairly seriously about ripping it out and trying again, but given that none of my fixes made any difference and that the right side looks far better than the wrong side I think I am just going to ignore it. However if anyone has ANY advice from avoiding this in the future it would be VERY welcome.

1 Comment

Comment by sylviatx on 19/4/2005 @ 4:14 am

I have that same problem with ribbing. On my Bed and Breakfast Pullover (IK mag) I tried two different methods. On the back I did the consciously tightening that you mention. On the reverse rows (purl side) I also consciously tightened. I mean TIGHT. Yank that yarn, hard.

On the front of the sweater I tried another method I read somewhere: wrap the purl the opposite direction from usual (Clockwise rather than counterclockwise); the logic goes, the wrap is shorter so the stitch tightens up. Then on the reverse side you have to knit into the back of the stitch to straighten it back out again.

Well, all said and done the back of the sweater is much prettier than the front. The “wrap wrong” method just transferred the loose goofy stitch from the left knit to the first purl, and it is so loose it almost looks LACEY at times. So from now on I am gonna YANK that yarn. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.

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